I'm surprised that Sitepoint - of all places - is using email subject lines like this:

50% SAVING + FREE PHP poster with Kevin Yank's New 'PHP & MySQL' Book

and "from" email addresses like this:

sitepoint-yuudpl1euldhurtu1y@cmail5.com

Our GWAVA5 company spam filter (which is where all of these go even if I try to set them as "ham") rates this as "Spam threshold 4" with a score of "0.95". I don't see anything higher than Threshold 5 and a Score of 1.0 for actual spam. It's not suprising given these well-known spam triggers: capital letters - "50% SAVING" - "FREE" and the fact that "cmail5.com" does not match the domain sitepoint.com.

Charles

HAWK
—
2012-05-03T01:57:31Z —
#2

charles_i said:

I'm surprised that Sitepoint - of all places - is using email subject lines like this:

50% SAVING + FREE PHP poster with Kevin Yank's New 'PHP & MySQL' Book

and "from" email addresses like this:

sitepoint-yuudpl1euldhurtu1y@cmail5.com

Our GWAVA5 company spam filter (which is where all of these go even if I try to set them as "ham") rates this as "Spam threshold 4" with a score of "0.95". I don't see anything higher than Threshold 5 and a Score of 1.0 for actual spam. It's not suprising given these well-known spam triggers: capital letters - "50% SAVING" - "FREE" and the fact that "cmail5.com" does not match the domain sitepoint.com.

Charles

Fair call Charles. I'll pass that on to our marketing team.

charles_i
—
2012-12-13T15:01:46Z —
#3

I see you are still doing this. FYI EVERY one of your Xmas offer emails to my work place lands in the spam filter because they are all from different addresses? And what's worse, the "From" address does not match Sitepoint.com - an obvious spam trigger - today they are from createsend5.com, and cmail1.com. What's worse you can't even mark these addresses as "ham" because they keep changing, like a professional spammer. Why?

molona
—
2012-12-17T15:55:15Z —
#4

charles_i said:

I see you are still doing this. FYI EVERY one of your Xmas offer emails to my work place lands in the spam filter because they are all from different addresses? And what's worse, the "From" address does not match Sitepoint.com - an obvious spam trigger - today they are from createsend5.com, and cmail1.com. What's worse you can't even mark these addresses as "ham" because they keep changing, like a professional spammer. Why?

I don't know and I can't explain this. Unfortunately @HAWK; will be a few days away and she's the only one with direct contact with HQ. I'm suspect that she doesn't have an answer. It may be a simple case of experimenting with different mass mailers to see which statistics are more accurate and which one works better.

Regarding the titles, I suspect that the campaign was planned in advance but I'm sure that Hawk passed you comments and they will take it into consideration for future campaigns

HAWK
—
2012-12-20T17:40:39Z —
#5

charles_i said:

I see you are still doing this. FYI EVERY one of your Xmas offer emails to my work place lands in the spam filter because they are all from different addresses? And what's worse, the "From" address does not match Sitepoint.com - an obvious spam trigger - today they are from createsend5.com, and cmail1.com. What's worse you can't even mark these addresses as "ham" because they keep changing, like a professional spammer. Why?

Hi Charles, the createsend email addresses are the result of Campaign Monitor, which is the service that we use to manage our email campaigns. I passed on your feedback re titles to the marketing team when you first posted, but they have written those emails as the result of careful studies into what has and hasn't worked for us in the past. I appreciate that they're not your thing.

thatlarkin
—
2013-03-27T21:29:09Z —
#6

HAWK said:

Hi Charles, the createsend email addresses are the result of Campaign Monitor, which is the service that we use to manage our email campaigns. I passed on your feedback re titles to the marketing team when you first posted, but they have written those emails as the result of careful studies into what has and hasn't worked for us in the past. I appreciate that they're not your thing.

I won't dispute the studies that your marketing folks are using, but I just deleted the email I received, spooked by "sitepointbroadcast.createsend5.com" domain. Then I saw here that it was legit. I assume your marketing studies account for recipients like me.

HAWK
—
2013-04-08T01:37:46Z —
#7

thatlarkin said:

I assume your marketing studies account for recipients like me.

I hope so!

AndyiBM
—
2013-10-08T19:25:40Z —
#8

I think this is the first time I've bothered to investigate whether these emails are yours or not - up until now I've assumed they were spam and deleted them all. When I normally get nicely-crafted HTML emails with images sent to my inbox from SitePoint, these basic text-only ones just don't give the impression that they are built by guys who know what they're doing - they just look like typical spam.

HAWK
—
2013-10-08T22:45:05Z —
#9

AndyiBM said:

I think this is the first time I've bothered to investigate whether these emails are yours or not - up until now I've assumed they were spam and deleted them all. When I normally get nicely-crafted HTML emails with images sent to my inbox from SitePoint, these basic text-only ones just don't give the impression that they are built by guys who know what they're doing - they just look like typical spam.

Hearing you. I'll send this the way of the marketing team again, as we have new people in the company that may have different ideas and or solutions.

That is the way that most (if not all) email marketing tools work. Those are tracking links. Unfortunately there is nothing at all that we can do about it. If you know of a tool that does it differently I'm definitely all ears.

ralphm
—
2014-09-22T06:46:18Z —
#12

Yes, that's the standard format of CampaignMonitor-send emails. Because they are so heavily optimised and careful about keeping everyone happy, I'm sure the cmail1.com domain is well regarded.

charles_i
—
2014-09-22T14:18:58Z —
#13

I was amazed to see this thread is still going! Anyway, despite what your research department says, for me 90% of your emails are still marked as spam by our GWAVA filtering program. And I cannot white list these emails because the sender is always a different email address. It's not always cmail1.com - sometimes it's cmail5.com or another number. As a result unless I see a topic in the part of the subject line that is visible in GWAVA that interests me I don't bother opening them. In contrast to this, the newsletters that come form "newsletters@sitepoint.com" always land in my inbox. I find it hard to believe that you can't use a fixed from address in Campaign Monitor. And from the other answers in this thread it doesn't look like this system is "keeping everyone happy."

And as for subject lines I thought it was common knowledge among email writers that words like "sale" "free" and "%" are automatic spam triggers. It only took me a minute to find these two links as an example (mind you I don't know how else you can word a book sale.)